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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Timothy Steele

1948- ,
Burlington ,
VT, United States

Timothy Steele was born on January 22, 1948 in Burlington, Vermont. He received a B.A. in English in 1970 from Stanford University, followed by a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977 from Brandeis University. His first collection of poems, Uncertainties and Rest, published in 1979, attracted attention for its colloquial charm and its allegiance to meter and rhyme at a time when free verse was the predominant style, especially among younger poets. Writing about the book in The Hudson Review, Richmond Lattimore called it "desperately and delightfully unfashionable."

Steele has published three additional collections: Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and most recently, Toward the Winter Solstice (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006). The first two books were reprinted in a joint volume, Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986 (1995).

A number of critics have observed that poetic form has never been an end in itself for Steele, but rather a means for engaging and exploring a wide range of subjects. Reviewing The Color Wheel in Poetry Magazine, Robert B. Shaw commented, "Aside from the esthetic pleasure his work affords, there is a controlled but powerful current of feeling in almost everything he writes."

Steele is also the author of a scholarly study of poetic modernism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (1990), about which Richard Wilbur wrote, "If it has not the slam-bang simplicity of polemic, it has something better: it is patiently evidential and well-nigh incontestable." His other prose includes All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (1999), designed mainly for students as a practical, nuts-and-bolts investigation of metrics. Steele has also edited The Music of His History: Poems for Charles Gullans on His Sixtieth Birthday (1989) and The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997).

Among Steele's honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center's Award for Poetry, a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody. He has held teaching appointments at Stanford, and the University of California, in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Since 1987, he has served as professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.

by this poet

"And these, small, unobserved . . . " —Janet Lewis
The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall;
Bees grapple spikes of lavender, or swarm
The dill's gold umbels and low clumps of thyme.
Bored with its trellis, a resourceful rose
Has found a

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s

General Ludendorff, two years before,
Had pushed the concept in his Total War,
And so it seemed a perfect time to see
If one could undermine an enemy
By striking its civilian population.
This proved a most effective innovation,
As the defenseless ancient Basque town learned:
Three quarters of its